10 CLOVERFIELD LANE: A Goodman Is Hard to Find

Director: Dan Trachtenberg
Writers: Josh Campbell, Matthew Stuecken, Damien Chazelle
Cast: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman, John Gallagher Jr.
Runtime: 103 mins.
2016

10 Cloverfield Lane is a great movie with a mediocre movie tacked onto the end of it. The script is tight and the performances are excellent. John Goodman in particular is incredible as the ambiguous savior/abductor about whom our thoughts and feelings are in perpetual flux. It's too bad the ending tries too hard to deliver some incongruous spectacle, and it's too bad this tight little thriller got branded with the Cloverfield moniker.

That's my review in brief. From hereon out, expect SPOILERS aplenty, because I'd rather not talk about this secretive little movie in the vaguest of terms.

The film starts on a nice little character beat. Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is packing her things. Something has gone amiss in her relationship to the point that she is picking up stakes and burning bridges. As she zips down a forested road, her car gets blindsided. She wakes up chained to a pipe, hooked to an IV, and lying on a mattress in a windowless chamber. This turns out to be one room in an apocalypse-prepped bunker created by Howard (John Goodman), an off-kilter presence whose obsession with safety is borderline religious. He tells Michelle that everybody is dead on the surface, a claim that she would have a much harder time believing if it weren't for the third person occupying the bunker, Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.), a pleasant local who wasn't abducted by Howard--he begged Howard to let him in.

This is a killer set-up for a movie, and first time director Dan Trachtenberg pingpongs our expectations like a master. As soon as we're certain that Howard is an unhinged maniac, we get compelling evidence that there is a real apocalypse happening up top. As soon as we get comfortable with Howard as a weird but dependable provider, we get compelling evidence of his more perverse proclivities.

Part of that is the ideal casting of John Goodman. We are so used to him in caring father figure roles that our natural inclination is to trust him reflexively. Coupled with the way his body dominates the claustrophobic bunker, his sudden outbursts of rage, and his bizarro line readings, we are dealt a whole mess of confused feelings about Howard as an audience.

That's as it should be, because this movie is unique in its willingness to provide both a psychological thriller and a sci-fi thriller. Typically we spend the runtime of movies like this figuring out whether there really is an apocalypse, or whether the captor is just deranged. In 10 Cloverfield Lane, the answer is both. It's an excellent gambit, as the existence of some form of apocalypse serves to distract us from the real danger that Howard presents, and vice versa. This is also one of my favorite aspects of The Shining--Jack is spiraling into insane alcoholism and the hotel is haunted. In both examples, the two sources of danger are interdependent. Jack and Howard would have been slightly unhinged in any situation, but the presence of the hotel and the apocalypse adds fuel to the fire.

Unfortunately, after an hour and a half of a tremendously tense balancing act, Trachtenberg cannot quite stick the landing. Everything up to Michelle's escape from the bunker is excellent, but then she encounters the aliens.

I'm all for weird tonal shifts in movies, but it doesn't work here. We spent the whole movie feeling the physical and psychological menace of one big old guy, and then suddenly our protagonist is taking down an entire alien airship with a molotov cocktail. Rather than heightening the tension, it diffuses it. Plus, compared to the visceral intrigue and uncertainty of the bunker, a weird alien dog chasing Michelle around a farmhouse feels underwhelming. I think the movie made the absolute correct choice in letting the apocalypse be real, but for a movie that until the ending had demonstrated such control over its tone, the sudden bombast is inexcusable. It feels like nothing more than a slapped on studio mandate, which may not be that far from the truth considering this film began its life under the title The Cellar, and only late in the process was subsumed under J. J. Abrams's Cloverfield moniker and given that cumbersome title. Perhaps it's exciting for somebody that the ending may connect this movie to 2008's Cloverfield, but I couldn't possibly care less.

On the flip side of the coin, grafting that brand name over this chamber thriller means that it received far more public exposure than it otherwise would have, so that's a boon. It's just too bad that movies aren't allowed to stand alone in this franchise climate.

3 / 5  BLOBS